IBM Creates Custom-Made Brain-Like Chip 105
An anonymous reader writes In a paper published Thursday in Science, IBM describes its creation of a brain-like chip called TrueNorth. It has "4,096 processor cores, and it mimics one million human neurons and 256 million synapses, two of the fundamental biological building blocks that make up the human brain." What's the difference between TrueNorth and traditional processing units? Apparently, TrueNorth encodes data "as patterns of pulses". Already, TrueNorth has a proven 80% accuracy in image recognition with a power consumption efficiency rate beating traditional processing units. Don't look for brain-like chips in the open market any time soon, though. TrueNorth is part of a DARPA research effort that may or may not translate into significant changes in commercial chip architecture and function.
Now they can replace IBM managers (Score:5, Funny)
Assuming of course this chip can hold 2 hr conference calls with 40 other chips and pound out 240 page Powerpoints.
HAL 9000? (Score:2, Funny)
Where are all the HAL 9000 jokes? HAL was built by IBM in "2001: A Space Odyssey", perhaps this is an example of life imitating art?